


Choose One

by OceanMelon



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon Divergence, Gen, hypothetical situations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-23
Updated: 2015-11-23
Packaged: 2018-05-03 00:34:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5269901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OceanMelon/pseuds/OceanMelon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before the beginning of everything, before the Trost Invasion, before the lives of the 104th change forever, Marco Bodt is given two options. He is shown two futures and made to choose. Neither holds a pleasant outcome.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Choose One

I guess, no matter what I choose, we can’t be together.

The speaker over my head crackled and the voice came through again.

“Choose,” it said and the screen before me flickered as the tape rewound to begin again.

 

The interior of a building. It’s dark even during the day time. My vision shakes as I run through empty rooms. The ceiling cracks and a rafter crashes through at my feet but I leap back, let it fall, and swing myself over it to keep running. I can’t stop. If I stop... everything will end.

I can hear footsteps outside. They echo through the house, through my body and I feel them bouncing around inside my chest with my wildly beating heart. I know what those footsteps mean. It’s coming. Death is walking steadily towards me. Unhurried but undeterred no matter where I hide. I know I shouldn’t be afraid. Not after all those years training to fight these things. I should be able to calmly analyse the situation and find a solution. But I can’t. I’ve seen too many friends die in the last few hours for rational thought. If anything, I should be angry. Angry that these creatures have killed so many of my friends – peers I have shared a classroom with for the last three years. But I don’t. All I have is fear and the need to get through this house, out the other side and back to safety.

It’s so close. I can see The Wall through the window. I jump through. The glass shatters around me, the metal grilles running across it tear and bend outwards as I fly through. But I am hardly immune to gravity and so I fall. The footsteps are coming closer now. They’re all around. Seven? Eight pairs of feet? Feet at big as a bus that could crush me like an ant. But, before I can hit the ground, I flick my fingers and two hooks fly from my waist to lodge themselves in the wall of the house across the street.

The zip line rings as it retracts back into my 3DMG and I fly. Over the street. Away from that house with the rafters falling in.

Then I stop. It’s dark and cramped and I know exactly where I am, though I’ve never been here before. The walls are closing in. I’m going to be crushed. My blades are right there but I can’t move my hands to stab into the fingers surrounding me. This is it.

This is the end.

The scene changes. It’s Jean and a bonfire and the rest of the 104th. It only takes me a moment to realise this isn’t a bonfire. It’s a pyre. A mass-cremation of every one of those friends I saw torn apart limb from limb. But why am I here? Why am I floating overhead instead of down there with the others? We should be together at such a time. I want to be there, to hold everyone’s hands. I want to put an arm around Connie as he sobs silently, curled up in a ball, rocking back and forth with his hands over his ears.

Jean looks completely expressionless. He’s just staring into the flames as if he can’t understand how they got there. Then he opens his mouth.

“Hey, Marco... I can’t even tell which bones are yours anymore.”

 

The screen flickered and the voice echoed around the empty room again before the new scene began.

Choose!

 

I’m standing on the rooftop watching as someone runs on the street below me. It’s Jean. Why is he running when he can fly so beautifully?

“So it was a problem with his gear!” says Connie, standing beside me.

Jean is tugging at the 3DMG of a dead soldier while, slowly, a monster is creeping up behind him. He pulls harder and harder, too panicked to stop and undo the buckles.

“Jean, calm down!” I shout down at him and he turns to face my voice.

“Marco?” he asks, fear still stained into his face.

The titan is barely two steps away now.

I grit my teeth and jump from the roof, sending a hook into the wall of a building where it meets the street. The line pulls me directly in front of the titan’s face. It grabs for me – the way you might swat away an annoying fly – but the distraction is not enough and, having already lost me, it turns back to Jean right there at its feet. It picks him up in its fingers, leaving him dangling by his coat in its grasp and flailing to get his blades high enough to carve himself free.

“Jean!” I run forward to the titan’s feet.

I stab the monster in the foot, in the ankle, in the shin, over and over but the skin only steams gently and the thing doesn’t even seem to notice.

“Marco!” Jean calls to me and I look up.

The titan has lifted him above its head as it turns its face to the sun.

I take a step backwards to gain enough room and shook a hook into the thing’s shoulder. The line pulls me up with ease but too late.

The titan grins. It lets Jean go. He falls into the dark. He’s gone.

I don’t even know what I’m doing before I stab the titan in the eye with one blade and leave it there, using both my hands to grip the other as I drive it into the shoulder beneath my feet again and again and again until the steam from its wounds is scorching my skin.

I know I’m screaming.

I know what I’m doing will neither bring my friend back from its stomach nor cause any sort of damage to the monster that ate him but I don’t care. I just need to hurt it. I need to inflict some sort of pain on it for no other reason than I can’t think of anything else to do.

A hand comes up. It’s as big as my bed at home. The hand comes up and then down, crushing me against the shoulder. It squashed me like a bug. I feel my ribs crack.

I hear my name from somewhere and suddenly both the titan and I are on the ground, Annie standing above the steaming chunk she’d cut from its neck.

I’m still alive. I’m still alive.

 

The screen flickered and faded to black. I looked around the room for anything else but there was nothing. It was just a white room, empty of everything but the chair on which I sat and the screen before my eyes.

“Choose,” said the voice for a third time. “Choose one and it shall be yours.”

I looked up at the black screen again. “Well,” I said, having already made my choice as soon as the backlight went out behind the images. “If I can only choose one... I guess I’ll have to go with –”

**Author's Note:**

> So I actually wanted to write a story where Marco makes this choice, it creates two parallel worlds (one in which Jean lives but Marco dies and the other where the opposite is true), and the two of them spend almost all their free time hanging out at each others graves where they can overlap each other but never touch (Yet, neither knows the other is alive in another world). Yeah, it was going to be sad. I can't quite remember why I never followed through on that... I probably just got stuck as I always do and had to drop it.  
> All the same, I hope you enjoyed what eventually ended up happening. Don't be scared to let me know what you think!


End file.
